An enjoyable memoir of life upstate.
A retired humanities professor looks back on his upbringing in working-class Buffalo, New York, during the 1950s.
Shurgot (North American Players of Shakespeare, 2007, etc.) writes that he has “sketched here the childhood that for many years I chose not so much to forget as to ignore.” The city he describes feels at once completely familiar and utterly foreign. His Buffalo is one of coal men and rag men, of steel-toe Red Wing boots, of winter ice chopped from Lake Erie to cool the city’s iceboxes, and neighbors in summertime sitting on their porches listening to the broadcast of a baseball game. He is the oldest son of an energetic Irish mother, drawn with verve and affection, and a taciturn Ukrainian father who threatened to inscribe his wife’s tombstone with the words, “She detested peace and quiet.” There’s not much conflict in these chapters, which discretely detail stories involving things from Catholicism to water skiing; nevertheless, Shurgot gamely explores the misdemeanors that exist in any family. They mostly stem from a somewhat withholding father who brushes off his children’s bids for attention, hurting them more than he probably realizes. Thinking back to the way his father often classed each home repair project as “a one-man job,” Shurgot “vowed that I would never utter that phrase to my children.” His two sisters received even less attention, and Shurgot draws a line from that mild neglect to one’s teenage pregnancy. He’s conscious in retrospect not only of that subtly different treatment, but also of Buffalo’s broader racial segregation, which meant he saw no black people except at minor league Buffalo Bisons games. But this retrospection also constitutes the book’s most frustrating flaw: Many of the stories are told from a distance of years, uncolored by the immediacy of sensory detail as he narrates the experiences rather than re-creates them. Still, the nostalgic detail and Shurgot’s own honesty hit home. When, decades later at a Seattle party, the author mentions he’s from Buffalo, a well-heeled wag responds, “I’m so sorry.” “I’m not,” he huffs; readers won’t be, either.
An enjoyable memoir of life upstate.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495248900
Page Count: 144
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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